Richard loses his temper with true enjoyment. It’s beautiful to watch. Our fights are delightful screaming matches, and Richard is rather like a small atom bomb going off.

-Elizabeth Taylor, Furious Love

 I took the advice of dear Lainey and took out “Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century” from the library. Devoured it in two days. Brangelina doesn’t have anything on these two, I so wish I could have been around to watch this play out in the press.

We have this idea about modern decency and morality (or lack thereof) and tend to look at our contemporaries and even to Hollywood, tsktsk-ing that things like adultery, scandals and five-second marriages “just weren’t done” fifty years ago. Lies!

I don’t kid myself that it’s not happening, but these days publicists, managers and handlers have ensured that the really smutty stuff gets locked down and paid off most of the time before it can ever reach the press. Today you’d never hear about whole productions being shut down for hours while the two stars had wild make-up sex. 

I think my generation missed out on these two, I had certainly heard their names but had no idea about the explosive nature of their romance, their two marriages, the yachts and diamonds, children and dogs. How terribly disappointing that I am living in an era where we pretend that couples don’t fight, rather than delighting in the friction, the atom bombs.